Harlan Ellison may be the most arrogant, smugly obnoxious writer in science fictiondom, but he writes like his eyeballs are being sliced with papercuts. That's a good thing. These stories from 1961 are "stories of the lost, the damned, the helpless, trying to get a handle on life." The themes are the social concerns rising in the public eye at that time: racial prejudice, narcotics addiction, juvenile delinquency, anti-Semitism, alienation, violence. With talent like this, a lot of people overlook his less attractive qualities. Me, I take the package as a whole. ( )